Monday, November 10, 2008

What is the difference between Portlet container and Portal?

Portal

  • Manages the request/response to a portlet. Portal receives the request on behalf of a portlet, sends it to portlet and sends back the response to the user.
  • Handles authentication of the users.
  • Generates a document based on the fragments from the different portlets in the page. This is called content aggregation.
  • Makes sure user is provided the content (Portlets) for which user is authorized. For example some users may not be authorized to view a portlet or edit a portlet and these are taken care of by the Portal.

Portlet Container

  • Provides runtime environment and manages the Lifecycle of the Portlet like a Servlet container manages the lifecycle of a Servlet.
  • Portlet container provides persistent storage for portlet preferences.
  • Portlet container receives requests from Portal if a portlet needs to fulfill a request and the portlet container passes it on to required portlet.
  • After obtaining the response from the Portlet, Portlet container sends the fragment of the portlet to the Portal for aggregation.

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